Post-war Theatre Research Articles

Plays as linguistic games: a literal interpretation of Beckett’s postwar theatre

In this article, I propose a ‘literal’ interpretation of Beckett’s postwar theatre, which allows to give importance to an ‘aesthetic of sound’ in which a work of art finds its own sense in the fact that it is a linguistic game created by an author. After 1945, the author becomes unable to speak about the profound themes of the Western tradition, but can write plays in which there is the configuration of an aesthetic of the small talk, to be analyzed according to a hermeneutics of superficiality.

La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano); La Leçon (The Lesson); Les Chaises (The Chairs)

La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano); La Leçon (The Lesson); Les Chaises (The Chairs)

King Lear “After” Auschwitz: Shakespeare, Appropriation and Theatres of Catastrophe in Post-War British Drama. By Richard Ashby

Richard Ashby’s King Lear “After” Auschwitz takes flight from Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”1 Adorno’s call for an aesthetics founded on contradiction rather than harmonization speaks directly to the dissonances of King Lear, and Adorno’s turn to Beckett in search of a dramaturgy tuned to catastrophe dovetails with the Lear-Beckett rapprochement that defines so much postwar theater. Ashby uses Adorno’s aesthetic and cultural writings to organize a project enriched by many other thinkers who were interred or displaced by the Holocaust, including Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and Walter Benjamin, and the cover of the book displays a sketch of Poor Tom in his hovel by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was deemed a degenerate by the Nazis. Nonetheless, this is not an inquiry into the meanings of King Lear for Jewish thinkers or other victims, survivors, and direct witnesses of the camps. Instead, Ashby, like Adorno, uses the phrase “after Auschwitz” to diagnose postwar consumerism, the automatism of mass culture, and the rise of the administrative and biopolitical state. This metonymizing of Auschwitz allows Ashby to take up a subject rather different from Shakespeare and the Holocaust per se: namely, appropriations of King Lear by postwar British playwrights, who addressed historical and existential traumas that unfolded after the camps had been emptied, such as the pain of exile and social alienation (David Rudkin’s 1984 Will’s Way), the genocide in Bosnia (Sarah Kane’s 1995 Blasted), and the devastations of industrialism and climate change (Forced Entertainment’s 2016 Table Top Shakespeare, Dennis Kelly’s 2010 The Gods Weep). The result is a powerful study of Shakespearean appropriation that deftly maneuvers among critical, textual, philosophical, and performance materials in order to craft definitive readings of major works of modern British drama and establish the unique thematic and formal affordances of King Lear as equipment for confronting catastrophe.

‘Peter Brook’s Night of the Living Dead’: Horror, cinema and the post-war theatre

An examination of the relationship between theatre and film that focuses on the work of figures associated with the post-war British theatre but whose film work was often understood in terms of horror. In particular, it examines the ways in which their work was understood as shocking audiences through a confrontation with repressed materials and as narratively staging conflicts between protagonists that represent conflicting ideas. In other words, these stories were often understood as staging battles between characters that sought to assert domination and control over their adversaries, battles that often featured psychological cruelty and destructiveness.

Hibernation Works for Bears but not for Theatre: The Notion of Community among Theatre Institutions and Experimental Theatre Groups in Slovenia (1955–1967)

The paper proposes that the experimental theatre scene in Slovenia in the years 1955–1967 formed a community. The performative visions of experimental groups acted as subtle gestures opposing the prominent aesthetic trend that dominated the performing scene in central institutions of postwar theatre creativity. The latter found it difficult to connect with its audience since it dealt with issues of lesser concern and lacked a true connection with progressive theatre currents (predominantly coming from France).

A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”: Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.

1968 and rural Japan as a site of struggle. Approaches to rural landscapes in the history of Japanese documentary film

ABSTRACT In the twentieth century, Japan produced an extraordinary documentary film heritage around the rural world which has not received sufficient attention. This article identifies three different approaches to the rural in Japanese film history: first, the wartime interest in place as providing an “authentic essence” of a national identity. Second, the postwar representation of the rural in public relations films (PR eiga), mainly interested in geography. And third, the release of Ogawa’s Summer in Sanrizuka in 1968 which brought a new dimension to a countryside transformed into both a battlefield and an icon of the political protest of the era.

The Crisis of Artistic Forms after 1945; Abstractionism and the Theatre of the Absurd versus Abstract Theatre Dilemma

Abstract The present study aims to revive the discussion on Martin Esslin’s 1961 labeling of the post-war theater as “absurd” and proposes the consideration of a new paradigm: “abstract theater”. In the great existential and artistic crisis triggered by the end of the Second World War, post-war art oriented itself towards an abstract expression that would dominate the 5th and 6th decades of the 20th century. A panoramic study of the second wave of the avant-garde represented by abstract art could also include these dramatic texts in the great abstract movement of the period. This approach could reopen, in the spirit of the analysis of that Zeitgeist, a fruitful discussion, integrating the art of theater in the great post-war abstractionist spirit.

A Springboard for Complexity: The User as a Critique of Modernist Architectural Conventions, ca. 1960

This essay outlines the influence that the new guidelines and conventions introduced by the postwar representations of the user exerted on the design of collective housing during the period between ca. 1950 and ca. 1970. It analyzes the forces that brought them to the fore, its various meanings, the polemics it was part of, and fundamentally, how its instrumentalization ushered in a new agenda of heterogeneity – a process that allowed a drastic raising of the threshold of architecture’s formal and procedural complexity. The conclusions establish that what had been initially posited as a set of external demands on architectural design became a means by which the discipline was able to adapt and exert its influence on the new cultural conditions of what would later be described as the era of postfordism. The findings of the essay are based on a review of relevant primary sources as well as recent historiographical discussions of the architecture of the postwar period.

Padyak V. Istoriia karpatorusyns′koho natsional′noho teatra y dramaturgiï. Vysokoshkols′kyi uchebnyk. Priashiv: Vydavatel′stvo Priashivs′koho univerziteta, 2018. 344 s.

This article presents the textbook of the famous Transcarpathian and Slovak Rusinist Valery Padyak Istoriia karpatorusyns′koho natsional′noho teatra y dramaturgiï [History of the Carpatho-Rusyn National theatre and drama]. The Rusyns (more precisely, the Carpatho-Rusyns) are the autochthonous East Slavic population of the Carpathian region: Ukrainian Transcarpathia and the adjacent regions of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. There is also a Rusyn diaspora present in Serbia, Croatia, the USA, Canada, and other states. The number of Rusyns in the world is a controversial issue, one reason for this being their polyvariant identification. At present, a significant proportion of ethnic Rusyns consider themselves representatives of an independent people, who are not Ukrainian or Russian. Padyak, a staunch supporter of the Rusyn ethno-national identity and at the same time a serious academic scientist, made an attempt to trace the development of drama and theatre in the Rusyn environment in parallel with the processes of Rusyn national self-determination. The author traces the evolution of folk theatre performances to the modern Rusyn national theatre, which is actively being developed in different states with Rusyn inhabitants. V. Padyak pays increased attention to theater and drama in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as during the period when Subcarpathian Rus (Transcarpathia) entered the structure of interwar Czechoslovakia and Horthy Hungary. In contrast, the author hardly examines post-war theater life in the Transcarpathian region, believing that its study is more appropriate in the context of Ukrainian, rather than Rusyn, studies. This textbook by V. Padyak, addressed primarily to Rusynist students at the University of Prešov (Slovakia), is of undoubted interest to anyone interested in the history and culture of the Rusyns.

The First Italian Microhistory: Primo Levi and Postwar Representations of Alterity

Abstract In the final chapter of his not-quite-autobiography, Il sistema periodico, Primo Levi claims that the work “È, o avrebbe voluto essere, una microstoria” (229), the implications of which are vast. According to Carlo Ginzburg, it is in this passage that “the word microstoria appears in Italian for the first time in an autonomous manner” (“Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It” 15). This article explores the microhistorical tenets manifest in Levi's writing, the history of the term itself, and Italian microhistory's ostensible ties to Italian neorealism. Indeed, the composition of Il sistema periodico represents an important moment in the progression of popular and scholarly representations of alterity, re-contextualizing Levi in a milieu of partisans and survivors keen on rewriting history.

THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT WAR AND MORALE DURING BRITAIN'S PHONEY WAR

AbstractThis article examines the memory of the Great War and the underexplored topic of morale during the Phoney War, and contributes to, and connects, their historiographies. Analysis of previously unexamined Mass Observation (MO) material confirms and qualifies some of the concerns about morale that MO expressed at the time. It also reveals that many Britons looked backwards to the Great War during the Phoney War, whether they had lived through the Great War or not, and their memories and understandings of the Great War informed their attitudes to the Second World War. Memories of wartime trauma were just one facet of the varied legacy of the Great War that Britons drew upon. Importantly, Britons of different ages drew upon post-war representations and personal and vicarious experiences to different extents, but those who were able to typically ascribed influence to personal rather than cultural memories of the Great War. This complicates the assumption that the latter determined Britons’ responses to the outbreak of the Second World War and contributes to understandings of both the reception and influence of cultural representations of the Great War, and the place of the Great War in the subjective worlds of Britons during the Second World War.

Transnational Time: Reading Post-War Representations of the Italian Presence in East Africa

ABSTRACTDeveloping from a discussion of the importance of placing Italian culture in transnational perspective, this article addresses the representation of the Italian presence in East Africa during the colonial period and in the decades following the Second World War. It looks at the writings of Erminia Dell’Oro, Nicky Di Paolo and Gabriella Ghermandi. It argues that our ability to see these writings as a complex evocation of multi‐faceted material and psychic realities is enhanced if they are read in the light of recent theoretical work that has explored how the spectre of the past returns to trouble both individual consciousness and the collective imaginary. The article contends that by reading representations of the Italian presence in East Africa in this light we can gain a greater sense of how they attempt to represent the individual’s participation in some of the most deeply layered transnational social practices.

Agustín González y sus comienzos como actor en el TEU

El TEU supuso para Agustín González el momento crucial de su carrera. Sin él, seguramente no habría podido dedicarse profesionalmente a la interpretación. Pero también significó para él un lugar de formación artística, reflexión y acción social, y un vivero creativo donde pudo relacionarse con las personalidades más vanguardistas del teatro de la época. Gracias al TEU, Agustín González colaboró en dos estrenos de importancia capital para la historia del teatro español de la posguerra: Tres sombreros de copa y Escuadra hacia la muerte, e intervino en la realidad cultural del momento, no de forma incidental, sino con un papel relevante.

Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s by Benjamin Kohlmann

Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, by Benjamin Kohlmann. Oxford University Press, 2014. 228 pages. As Benjamin Kohlmann argues in Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, the intensity with which many thirties authors criticized the idea of political writing after 1939 has one of the iconic volte-faces in twentieth-century (197). By the end of the decade, numerous authors and intellectuals had already begun to dismiss the politically committed produced during the 1930s. Among the most prominent voices were some who had contributed to this very literature. This dismissal established foundation for postwar representation of the period as literary wasteland (198), view that Kohlmann argues was shared by figures from the American critic, Stanley E. Hyman to the writer and Horizon editor Cyril Connolly, both of whom saw the attempt to politicize literature as failure (199). This response to the decade, Kohlmann argues, continues to inform own standards of critical evaluation. His position parallels that of Valentine Cunningham, who insists that the 1930s are still seen as a sort of unfortunate historical blip or bypass on which writing got snagged and slowed down in the march of the twentieth century from modernism at the very beginning to postmodernism at the end, time when writers were distracted from their proper artistic concerns by crude ideological preferences which history has not sustained (1997, 5). The emphasis on the beginning and the end of the century is reflected in the focus of journals, conferences, professional organizations, job advertisements, syllabi, and publishers' lists. A few authors from the period, such as W. H. Auden, have, as Cunningham puts it, made into the pantheon of the great and good (6), but their standing often depends partly on the claim that they avoided or later rejected the errors of their contemporaries. As Kohlmann argues, while recent neo-formalist criticism has virtually bypassed thirties ... Auden's 'September 1, 1939' and his elegy for Yeats with its resonant warning that 'poetry makes nothing happen' have become touchstones for critics like James Longenbach, Angela Leighton, and Peter McDonald precisely because their air of resignation seems to advocate way to retreat from political action and into the narrower confines of poetic form (12). These poems seem to confirm the idea of engagement as mistake that allowed politics to displace literature, an error that had to be rectified. Auden is important, then, because he achieves distance from the period. Conventional wisdom maintains that the intellectual life of the 1930s was dominated by mass movements, most notably Communism, which stifled writers, imposing on them rigid set of ideas, political positions, and even forms, such as Socialist realism. At the end of the decade, the most talented artists confessed their errors, regaining their creativity, while the rest faded into deserved obscurity. This narrative has multiple origins, but arguably the most important, as Kohlmann suggests, were some of the artists who recanted. Figures such as Stephen Spender had disproportionate impact on perceptions of the decade; their prominence during the 1930s served as guarantee of the value and faith of their interpretations. The individual experience of handful of prominent, disillusioned authors established familiar trajectory of thirties writing--from grandiose political expectations to disillusionment (13)--that came to be seen as characteristic of the period as whole, obscuring the diversity of its writers, political positions, and forms of engagement. There have been numerous attempts to challenge this image of the 1930s and the narrow canon of it sustains. These interventions have valuably complicated and extended our understanding of the decade, drawing attention to wide range of writers beyond the small circle of white, male, public-school educated poets on which influential texts such as Samuel Hynes's The Auden Generation (1976) and Bernard Bergonzi's Reading the Thirties (1978) have focused and undermining the narrative of common experience of political engagement and disillusion. …

‘Turcos’ and ‘Chinos’ in El Salvador: orientalizing ethno-racialization and the transforming dynamics of national belonging

ABSTRACTIn the immediate aftermath of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–1992), there arose fresh attention to questions of national culture, history, and identity. Postwar official textbooks and museums emphasized mestizaje (defined here as the historical mixing of Spanish and Indigenous populations that accompanied the colonial experience). The discourse of mestizaje, based on an idealized vision of an integrated national population, not only eclipsed the ongoing presence of Indigenous populations, but also excluded other groups that make up El Salvador’s diversity. With a focus on Palestinian and Chinese migrations to El Salvador, this article juxtaposes their general absence from early official postwar representations of the nation and their vernacular identification as ‘turcos’ and ‘chinos’ – identifiers that Orientalize and racialize while conferring erroneous ideas about ethnic identity. I report on new civil society and state-led efforts that strive to valorize Indigenous, Palestinian, Chinese, and Afro-descendent identity in El Salvador, arguing that it signals a new dynamic in how national belonging is being defined.

Pamięć o Zagładzie w perspektywie historyka teatru

In his Polski teatr Zaglady [The Polish Theater of the Holocaust], Grzegorz Niziolek, who starts with theater and specific theatrical performances and who focuses on artistic phenomena, presents problems that go far beyond art. This is a book that should be read by historians, literary scholars, political scientists and cultural experts. Sociologists and psychologists who study social behavior will also find some of its sections interesting. This Cracow theatrologist presents the extermination of Jews during the occupation of Poland as well as Polish-Jewish relations, i.e. one of the most difficult Polish problems, permeated with silence and resentment, in the form of a monograph and in relation to the history of post-war theater, of which it is an important part.

A More Humane Mikado: Re-envisioning the Nation through Occupation-Era Productions of The Mikado in Japan

The first authorized productions in Japan of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado took place in the early years of the post-war American occupation. A group of Japanese theatre-makers whose international engagement had been circumscribed by the war were involved in these productions – first a 1946 American-led version for occupation personnel, and then an ‘all-Japanese’ version in 1947 and 1948. For these artists, The Mikado, a foreign operetta that was simultaneously ‘about Japan’ and not, offered a way of rebuilding post-war Japanese theatre, and, in doing so, imagining new possibilities for the nation. Through The Mikado they performed a ‘cosmopolitanism at home’, a mode of engagement with the international from within the borders of one's own nation.

Guilt, Nostalgia, and Victimhood: Korea in the Japanese Theatrical Imagination

How has post-war Japanese theatre grappled with Japanese responsibility for its imperialistic/militaristic past in Asia, and for institutionalized discrimination against resident minorities? Using the tools of guilt, nostalgia, and the valorization of victimhood that are embedded in the idea of hōgan biiki (sympathy for the loser/victims), Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei here analyzes Japan's often contradictory, flip-flopping self-image as both victimizer and victim in relation to Korea and resident Koreans. Looking at both mainstream and alternative performances, her article suggests that despite attempts to discuss these issues openly, most theatre artists actually present images that soften or displace responsibility for the past. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, and was recently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität, Berlin. An authority on post-war Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and award-winning playwright. Her books include Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan and the co-authored Theatre Histories: an Introduction. She has published numerous articles and presented papers and keynotes throughout the world. Professor Sorgenfrei is Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and Editor of the Association for Asian Performance Newsletter.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Sarah Banet-Weiser This issue of American Quarterly includes engaging and insightful essays that cover a range of important topics for American studies scholars, including issues of creative production and representation in photography and art, the uses of sexuality in labor organizing, postwar cultural memory, and an essay about the state of the field of American studies. This first issue of AQ in 2013 begins with an essay by George Lipsitz and Barbara Tomlinson, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” where the authors offer deep historical knowledge and understanding of the field of American studies. Calling on us as scholars, teachers, and activists, they argue that the future of American Studies requires us to know “the work we want our work to do.” In this context, they call on scholars to refuse the construction of scholarly relations as competition and instead think of these relations as “accompaniment.” The essay provides a searing analysis of neoliberalism’s impact on the academy and the field of American studies, yet importantly traces the positive vision and optimistic energy that drives the field. Robert K. Chester’s essay focuses on the wartime and postwar representations of African American, Doris Miller, as a hero in the US national and historical memory of Pearl Harbor. Through this examination, Chester offers a broadening analysis for the place of race in American cultural memories of World War II. The shifting frames of remembering Miller provide the context for Chester’s crucial concept, “retroactive multiculturalism,” which identifies the process whereby racial inequalities are relegated to the past in order to highlight military triumphalism. The next article offers a provocative and important analysis of the uses of sexuality by the United Farm Workers (UFW). Ana Raquel Minian shows the prolific appearance of sexuality (from prostitution to homosexuality to sexual abstinence and birth control) in much of the UFW’s public discourse and documents, including speeches, songs, and the pages of the union’s newspaper, El Malcriado. As Minian convincingly argues, heteropatriarchal ideas about sexuality were used to frame the UFW, and contributed to the union’s success. In her analysis, she asks us to consider what larger issues are at stake when particular hegemonic representations are utilized in struggles for systemic change. [End Page vii] Following, we have Iyko Day’s essay, which examines representations in the realm of landscape art. She looks at photographer and artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs of US and Canadian landscapes as a queer parody of the western conventions that have dominated landscape art in the first part of the twentieth century. These parodies (of artists such as Ansel Adams and Gutzon Borglum) are critical political representations that focus on the eugenic ideals projected into the settler colonial landscape. Finally, we have an essay by Shelley Jarenski which examines African American artists’ and writers’ engagement with the visual aesthetics of panoramas. In this well-designed research project, Jarenski raises important issues for American studies scholars about social identities and visual culture. She investigates the cultural role of panoramas and argues that, while panoramas have been used in imperialist projects, they have also been a source for African American political and artistic projects. Taking a broad historical look, she focuses on J. P. Ball’s 1855 abolitionist panorama as well as contemporary artist Kara Walker’s panoramic silhouettes, and re-reads the second autobiography of Frederick Douglass through this lens. We also include in this issue a timely and important forum on “Visual Culture and the War on Terror,” edited by Matt Delmont. Featuring an introduction and an essay by Delmont, the forum also includes short essays by Evelyn Alsultany, Sasha Torres, Stacy Takacs, Anjali Nath, and Erika Doss. As Delmont says in his introduction, we need to think carefully about the role of visual culture in the “War on Terror,” as “visibility and invisibility are deeply intertwined in the war on terror, and as such, the study of visual cultures offers a critical vantage point from which to understand what is seen and what remains unseen in this war.” In this issue, we also introduce a new feature of AQ: “Interview.” The AQ editorial board felt that there are some occasions where it...